The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves Hardcover – April 16, 2009

This is probably going to be the longest Amazon review I have ever written. I am compelled to write this detailed review because this book is excellent, and its accuracy as I see it from an Indian perspective, is spot-on.

I grew up in India, and was educated entirely in private schools (for obvious reasons you can learn about by reading this book). Unlike private schools catering to the poor that this book examines, I went to ones that were for the middle class. (Note that “middle class” in this context means something different from what a typical westerner would think of.) My school fees were on the order of $10-$15 per month. Because of my father’s job-related moves, I changed 9 schools during my K-12 education. Of those 9 schools, 4 were for-profit secular schools and 5 were non-profit religious schools (1 Anglican, 1 Catholic, and 3 Hindu). The education I received in each school was excellent. Nearly every teacher I had was great and instilled a desire for learning in me. I still remember them with fondness.

The recurring theme of this book is the love that poor parents have for their children that motivates them to pay money out of their meager pockets to send their children to entrepreneur-run private (mostly) for-profit schools, instead of sending them to “free” government schools. This is the same love that my parents felt that motivated them to make huge sacrifices for my sibling and me, and this is the same love I feel for my children.

The second recurring theme you will find in this book is that profit on the one hand, and ethics/charitableness/humanity on the other, are not mutually exclusive. Profit is not an ignoble motive, and the desire for profit does not automatically invalidate the humanity of a person providing a service, nor corrode their intentions. There is ample proof of it throughout the book; in fact, a case study school in Makoko in Lagos State (Nigeria) admitted 9% of its students with ZERO tuition (see page 252). In my own personal life, my mother used to tutor children part-time, and I remember her tutoring a poor child for an entire year for free. My father’s eye surgeon in the city of Bhopal ran a private for-profit clinic, and he used to care for poor patients for free, without any government mandate or reimbursement, and without any discrimination based on religion or caste.

Some people have knee-jerk negative reactions when they hear words like “private” and “profit” and “corporation”. This book should resoundingly disabuse such people of their notions (assuming their minds are not sealed shut a priori). As Frederic Bastiat wrote in Economic Harmonies, “the profit of the one is the profit of the other”.

As an immigrant in America, I was surprised when I first found out that education here is heavily dominated by government schools. And now as a father of American children, I am shocked by the level of educational spending when compared to what parents and taxpayers get in return for it. The inflexibility, increasing centralization, and “one-size-fits-all” approach of government schools, combined with a lack of parental choice (partly due to crowding out of the private sector) is really bothersome.

In sum, this book offers substantive proof on the efficacy of private schools for the poor in the so-called “third world”. I really hope that transnational development agencies have paid attention to Prof. Tooley’s work.

A similar approach of private schooling and school choice, in my opinion, will also benefit the United States. I hate to conclude on a pessimistic note, but I doubt that it will ever happen given the overall blurring of the lines between society and government, the entrenched interests of the educational establishment, and political comfort zones that Americans would rather fight to stay in than cross. America will likely tinker around the edges, instead of unshackling voluntary, private, educational alternatives.

This is an amazing story that needs a much wider audience. If you search on the Tom Wood sit and the Econ Talk site you can find episodes that they did with James Tooley where you can listen to him talk about his experiences. This is what led me to buy the book, and I was not disappointed. Tooley's work to find out how people living in what we in the US would call extreme poverty (walk to school over half-rotting planks that cross open sewers, anyone) are opening and running their own private schools to educate each other is amazing.

Tooley is part anthropologist, part scientist, part economist, part political scientist as he explores a virtually uknown world--a world that officials living in the countries he is visiting repeatedly tell him does not exist. But the world of private schools for the poor does exist, and Tooley goes to great lengths to explore it and bring it alive for us.

The author was commissioned to document the effectiveness of monies sent to educate severely impoverished communities in numerous (mainly Asian/African) countries. He was surprised to discover such communities commonly had unrecognized makeshift schools which were far more effective than the well-funded institutions he had intended to study. -- Tooley explains how the makeshift schools profited from bonds of accountability between parents and teachers. -- Also, teacher shortages led makeshift schools to use their more advanced students as (highly supervised) teachers for the less advanced. There is evidence this system may have been observed by visitors who copied it into British education in the 18th & 19th centuries.

This book documents, in the strictest sense of that word, how free-market education is thriving in some of the poorest of third world countries. The comparison of state-run schools and their unmotivated staffs with schools staffed by teachers who depend on the quality of their efforts should resonate with many parents with school-aged children in the U. S., as well as with legislators who regulate our educational institutions. Poor people in various cultures are shown to sacrifice financially by paying fees to profit-making private schools in lieu of sending their children to nominally free public schools. This is not a dry, academic book, but is very well written. It holds the reader's interest with anecdotes of how the data in the book was acquired in some of the poorest slums of several countries.